Special Needs Bags, Taper Week, Aero Gains & Raceday Mechanicals: Your IRONMAN Questions Answered | Ep 602

All right then, let's jump right in to this week's questions.

Here we go.

First up from Luke Gardner.

He says, Hi Rob, hope all's well.

Thanks a lot for producing the Oxygen Addict podcast.

This has been a game changer for me, having prepped for my first full Ironman in Switzerland.

Having only used ChatGPT, I don't have any friends who've completed a full or half.

It's essentially been a lifesaver to find your podcasts a few months back.

nutrition splitting my long runs and rides into the 9-1 recovery race simulations they're just a couple of vital points that have made a huge difference to my preparation i saw a couple of people have written in with questions so i'm just on the off chance you might be able to be looking for some more topics i wanted to see if i could pose a few that i don't think have been covered so firstly I see there are special needs bags on the bike and run that you can put non-returnable items into.

Are there any must-haves for first-timers that you would recommend having in both bags? For example, I know on one podcast you mentioned having a jumper in the run bag.

I'd never even thought of this.

Okay, so let's go through special needs bags then.

This is basically... a plastic bag that you'll get given at transition check-in when you check in the day before the race.

It'll have your number stuck on it.

You can put stuff into this bag and then you hand that bag back in and it will be available to you out on the course.

So your bike bag will be there on the bike course.

Your run bag will be there on the run course.

It's up to you to stop and you can stop and you can go and get things out of the bag if you want.

You don't have to, but you can do.

So a couple of things worth considering.

Some races, this is entirely optional and you might not need to use it at all.

Some of these events, it's actually essential.

So when I did Ironman France a few years ago, you kind of had to rely on your special needs bag at one point because you had to put your own water bottle in there to pick it up at the top of the big climb.

So well worth reading the race briefing ahead of time for this.

But we're going to go with the standard thing, which is that nothing essential has to go in there because most of the stuff is covered for you on aid stations.